By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry
About four years after the kompu gacha shock hit Japan’s mobile game industry hard, gacha as a monetization mechanic is in the news again. This might be over soon, and I don’t intend to discuss the ethics of gacha right now (this may come soon), but please refer to my simple primer from...
Shortly after DeNA (2432) and GREE (3632) pioneered the concept of mobile gaming as the world knows it today (free-to-play business model, bite-sized content embedded in social networks to increase stickiness, data analysis to improve monetization, etc.) in 2006/2007 on feature phones, a flood of...
dotGEARS, the Vietnam-based studio behind global mega hit Flappy Bird, signed a deal with OBOKAIDEM, a game brand operated by Tokyo-based Media Kobo (3815). The announcement was made public last Friday (but has flown under the radar of English-language game media so far). Launched just last year...
US-based Niantic Labs, the Google spin-off that Nintendo (7974), The Pokemon Company and Google itself invested US$20 million in back in October, now has a presence in Japan. The company made it into the headlines in the gaming world in September as Nintendo’s chosen partner for the co...
LINE Corp. and Sega Games (6460) announced a marketing partnership for mobile games in Japan during a joint press conference yesterday. Not too surprisingly, Sega will act as the developer and publisher under the deal, while LINE Corp. will offer its messenger app as a platform for mass marketing...
While Japan does barely produce any new smartphone game developers nowadays, the number of those going public continues to rise. The latest such company to get listed at the Tokyo Stock Exchange (at the Mothers market for high-growth and emerging stocks, to be more exact) is Mynet, a developer...
By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry